U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be throwing spaghetti against the wall in the run-up to the midterms — and seeing what he can get journalists to choke down.

Earlier this month, he promised a 10 percent middle-class tax cut before the election in November, even though Congress wasn’t in session. He ordered troops to the border with Mexico to prevent a caravan of migrants from entering, yet that group is months away from reaching the U.S. And on Tuesday, he proposed ending birthright citizenship via executive order, which virtually all legal experts agree would be unconstitutional.

A pattern has emerged: Trump’s proposals are usually reported quickly — often credulously passed along in headlines and tweets — before thorough vetting later yields more skeptical reports.

“I think there is a pattern of at least the first reports on Trump statements being insufficiently skeptical,” said Daniel Dale, a Toronto Star correspondent in Washington who has gained a large following on Twitter for his real-time fact-checking of Trump. He said reporters are too willing to assume a statement is true or a proposal realistic.

“I don’t think I have all the coverage answers, but my mini-crusade has been trying to get people to not simply amplify Trump statements that are untrue without pointing out that they’re untrue,” Dale said. “Three years into this, it’s still not being done well enough, I don’t think. It’s just a core part of what we do. It’s not a departure from basic journalism.”

Trump’s relationship with facts has caused hand-wringing among journalists, who are still struggling with how to treat a president who says many things that don’t check out after further research. Trump’s rise to political prominence was built on his false claims that President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. As president-elect, he claimed — without any evidence — that millions of undocumented immigrants voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton, claims some news organizations initially reported verbatim.

And he’s been doling out new proposals freely in the weeks leading up to next week’s midterms, many of which critics say are impractical and geared mainly at ginning up his base. It’s not clear how that approach will play with voters, who are expected to send more Democrats to Congress in 2019.

The latest test for media outlets emerged Tuesday, when Axios published a video interview in which Trump declared he could single-handedly end birthright citizenship — the idea that most people born in the U.S. are automatically citizens, as provided by the U.S. constitution — and falsely claimed that the United States “is the only country in the world” that has such a practice. More than 30 countries have similar policies.

Almost immediately, the Associated Press blasted out Trump’s false claim about other countries to more than 300,000 Twitter followers, only to later delete the tweet. Axios also initially failed to challenge Trump’s remarks — both during the interview itself and in print — although its piece was updated later Tuesday. The New York Times made similar updates to its own piece, and POLITICO also initially reported Trump’s quote without pushback.

But despite the mid-day course correction, Trump’s comments were enough to get attention focused on the White House’s preferred topics, tweeted Atlantic writer David Frum, a Trump critic.

“Trump’s birthright citizenship vaporware is intended to prod cable TV into discussing something exciting to him, not boring stuff like pre-existing conditions and why would-be murderers are allowed to amass arsenals that could equip the police department of a small town,” Frum tweeted. “Or the worst month on world stock markets since 2009.”

Kathleen Bartzen Culver, the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Trump understands how conflict, novelty and his own out-sized persona increase the news value of stories, and he exploits news outlets’ race to report on him as soon as possible, despite the fact that he has racked up more than 5,000 falsehoods in office, according to a Washington Post tally.

“Donald Trump is particularly good at playing into some of the traditional practices of news and elevating coverage of himself,” Culver said.

The key to resisting that tactic, according to journalists and media experts, is not ignoring what the president says but adding context, even if it means taking longer to publish a story.

“Presidents often make proposals that may not have much chance of ever becoming law, sometimes to shape a campaign and sometimes just to generate a national debate on an issue they care about,” New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker said in an email. “That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t cover them. It means we should help readers understand the context in which the proposals are made and the circumstances that surround them.”

Tim Franklin, a senior associate dean at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, said that in the case of Trump’s claim that he can end birthright citizenship with the swipe of a pen, that means journalists should be “talking to legal experts who can analyze whether this is really feasible or not” before reporting what he said.

Individual journalists on Twitter quickly pushed back against Trump’s claims Tuesday. “This is false,” CNN’s Jake Tapper tweeted in response to a Bloomberg Politics tweet repeating the claim that the U.S. is the only country to respect birthright citizenship. Tapper, who boasts nearly 2 million followers, wrote that “at least 30 countries offer birthright citizenship, including almost every country in Central and South America.”

Dale said he has seen some improvement, citing how news outlets deleted tweets or updated their stories.

“I think there has been growth,” he said. “It’s just been painfully slow.”

The press gave primo coverage to Donald Trump’s outrageous utterances during the 2016 Republican presidential primaries because, well, he was a front-runner, and when front-runners speak, it’s news. After Trump secured the Republican nomination, the press gave similar notice to his tongue-wagging because — well, because it believes every trill and chirrup from a major party nominee contains news value. Later, when Trump became president and the press continued to steer his tweets, White House lawn utterances, and MAGA-rally speeches onto page 1, the justification for the saturation coverage was that no matter what strange noise flowed out of the president’s boombox, it was newsworthy and deserves ink and airtime.

And here we are, 21 months into his presidency, and Trump still reaps maximum exposure every time he says something cruel, improbable, or daft. Take his weekend promise to bestow a 10 percent tax cut on middle-class Americans before the midterm elections. Congress is out of session and nobody on Capitol Hill or inside the administration knew anything about the proposal — making passage on Trump’s timetable impossible. But that didn’t prevent the press corps from placing all of its oars in the water and rowing hard to take first place in the race to prove the president’s pitch a fantasy.

It’s not that the press and Washington politicians aren’t on to Trump’s tricks. In March 2018, the Associated Press reported how members of his own party have learned to ignore “Trump’s policy whims, knowing whatever he says one day about guns, immigration or other complicated issues could well change by the next.” In its Wednesday edition, the Washington Post reprised this theme, calling the tax cut promise a Trump policy whim and pointed to other whims that come and go: a Space Force, a ban on transgenders in the military, a military parade through the streets of Washington.

The president’s lack of follow-through on stuff like this indicates that his wish list is not to be taken seriously. All he desires is the momentary but deep attention of the nation. Having exploited the moment, he’s ready to advance to a new set of whims or attention-getting insults, and the press is all too ready to accompany him. In recent weeks, as Trump has effectively become his own press secretary in spur-of-the-moment pool sprays and bill signings, we’ve been treated to more incendiary comments from the nation’s biggest mouth. In the past, Trump has been candid about why he barks, blusters and fibs so aggressively. “I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion,” Trump wrote in “The Art of the Deal.”

The press corps’ new motto should read: “Just because the president said it, doesn’t mean it’s news.”

The rule that everything the president says is newsworthy was established in those days when presidents 1) were less omnipresent that Trump 2) were more circumspect in what they said and 3) in which there was no cable news. Nobody ever claimed that the president had a right to massive mindshare every time he opened his mouth, but that’s where we’ve landed. When Trump denounced kneeling NFL players — over whom he has no control — the press made a big deal out of it. When he claimed that “unknown Middle Easterners” have joined the migrant caravans, we elevated it. When he described well-reported news stories as “fake news,” we gave it big play. But why? The press long ago established that Trump lies with such frequency that it might be easier to count the number of true statements he’s made than false ones.

U.S. President Donald Trump | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Like winter rain in Seattle, Trump’s lies, his incessant name-calling, and his baseless rabble-rousing have become so common they merit almost no recognition as “news.” I’m not suggesting that the press ignore Trump when he refers to the “Democrat mob” or makes off-the-cuff threats to impose new tariffs. Reporters should still record his remarks for analysis. But they should abandon the default news-sense setting that dictates that any Trumpian riff deserves top-news treatment. As I brainstormed this idea with my editor, I suggested that newspapers could run columns (buried inside the front section) titled “Shit Trump Says” that would list Trump’s arbitrary policy pitches and verbal berserking. My editor said, no, that would only encourage him to fill the column with the sort of vituperation that would make it destination reading.

For once, my editor was right. The threshold for what constitutes news from Trump’s mouth should be reset. Unless his statements are true or his proposals have some chance of advancing, Trump’s loose talk belongs in concise and dismissive stories in the middle pages of the newspaper where we can skim them and move on. The press corps’ new motto should read: “Just because the president said it, doesn’t mean it’s news.” Put the president’s boombox on mute.

President Donald Trump left the podium in Missoula, Montana last Thursday, after spending most of his rally bashing the “fake news media,” and, almost immediately, headed over to a reporter waiting for him backstage.

The interview wasn’t with someone from CBS or CNN or even Fox News, but the local ABC and Fox station.

With Trump’s views on the national media unambiguously clear — he had reminisced earlier that evening about the time a year ago when Montana Rep. Greg Gianforte body-slammed a reporter — reporter Angela Marshall asked the president what he thought of the importance of local news.

“Very important, local news is very important, they really treat us well,” Trump said, with his walk-off song, The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get You Want,” still playing in the background. “Local news, people have no idea how important that is, but we’ve been getting great treatment.”

As the midterm elections approach, Trump is increasingly seeking out that treatment. His administration has lately been fixated on local markets, going to considerable lengths to stage-manage coverage of the president’s appearances with Republican candidates.

In October, Trump has done at least 10 local interviews tied to his rallies, chatting about nuclear-waste disposal in Nevada, soybean trade in Kansas, and yapping with Marshall about how many trips to Montana he’s made (three, the most by any president since Harry Truman).

Martha Joynt Kumar, who tracks presidential interactions with the press as the director of the White House Transition Project, said that before the midterm rally blitz, she could count only three times Trump had engaged local media in 2018. (Kumar said, though, that her tally could be missing some stops because the White House does not always publicize interviews.)

For a president who has bucked and defied the conventional wisdom — especially when it comes to the media — Trump aides and observers say the most notable aspect of his strategy in the closing days of the midterm campaign is just how traditional it is.

President Barack Obama often favored outreach through local and specialty media — outlets targeted at specific populations, such as Latinos —over national and was known to whip through several local TV or radio interviews per day from the White House. According to Kumar’s count, in the week before the 2010 midterms alone, Obama did 22 radio interviews.

Trump did some local media during his presidential campaign, but since taking office, he has mostly resisted that small-bore approach. His current local rush comes as Trump has tried to flood the zone with media appearances — but had a harder time breaking through. CNN and MSNBC have long since stopped airing his campaign rallies and, in recent weeks, Fox News has ceased carrying them in full as well. Local media, however, provides an opportunity to reach the very people he’s crisscrossing the country to rally ahead of November’s midterm elections.

“It’s an all of the above strategy,” said Bryan Lanza, the former Trump campaign deputy communications director. “He’s shouting it at the national level, he’s also shouting it at the local level.”

Kumar said: “I think he understands that if you want to get legislation through Congress, you’ve got to help elect your people, and part of that is getting to what people watch and what they listen to.”

Trump has not abandoned his attention to national media. He called into “Fox & Friends” earlier this month, and he has done recent interviews with the Associated Press, the New York Times and, on Monday, USA Today. In late September, he sat for an interview with Sinclair commentator — and former Trump campaign and White House staffer — Boris Epshteyn, which was blasted out in segments run on Sinclair’s 193 local stations nationwide.

Still, during Trump’s Western swing that ran through Saturday, he paid notably more attention to local reporters, conducting interviews at each stop for rallies with Republican Senate candidates Martha McSally of Arizona, Matt Rosendale of Montana and Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada.

In Arizona, Trump held a high-dollar fundraiser and primetime rally for McSally, a congresswoman and former pilot stationed in the Middle East. He also squeezed in a tour of an Air Force base, where he dressed down her Democratic opponent, Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, as “very strange.” The next day, a White House official came to the back of Air Force One to pass out printouts of Arizona Republic and Arizona Daily Star front pages with large photos of Trump and McSally. “TRUMP IN ARIZONA,” the Republic’s hammer headline blared. “President heaps praise on McSally during raucous rally in Mesa,” continued one subhead on the front page.

The official said that the president and his staff were eager for the traveling press corps to see the clippings.

Arizona local TV newscasts went wall-to-wall with Trump coverage from the eve of his visit until after he departed. Heller joined him in the motorcade in Arizona and for the flight to a rally in remote Elko, Nevada, ensuring that local photographers snapped shots of the president and endangered senator waving in front of Air Force One.

While presidential visits have always dominated local media, some presidential advisers and outside allies say this year’s campaigns are more focused on Trump than is typical for a midterm election. That means positive coverage in key battleground states could carry more weight.

“We haven’t seen an election like this, where the president is so at the focus on everything,” a former White House official said.

“It’s quite possible it could make a difference,” said Larry Sabato, the head of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, citing how close several key swing races are. “And you do it because you don’t know.”

Sabato added that presidents typically get lighter treatment from local hosts and anchors.

“He’s enjoying the friendly coverage, he’s basking in the glow of the local people’s deference to him and he realizes politically it’s the smart thing to do right now,” Sabato said. “No way he’s going to continue this after Nov. 6.”

Lanza agreed that local interviewers often go easier, arguing that “you don’t get the hostility” and “they’re less partisan than national.”

During his 2016 campaign, Trump didn’t need to engage as much with local media because he was getting so much coverage nationally, Lanza said. But now, he said, it’s a helpful tool for reaching as many people as possible.

Compared to his predecessors, Trump’s local media regimen is still relatively limited, and Lanza said he’d like to see him do even more, particularly radio. One day last October, for instance, Trump invited several radio shows to broadcast from the White House.

“People are super engaged in this election,” Lanza said. “You’ve got to be everywhere.”

“Go run the country,” Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy told U.S. President Donald Trump, wrapping up a 47-minute phone interview with the leader of the free world, which ended with Trump wishing a happy birthday to co-host Ainsley Earhardt’s father.

They had, it seemed, run out of new ground to cover.

After all, it had been only a few hours since Fox News viewers heard from the president, who had also called in for an 11 p.m. interview with Fox News host Shannon Bream Wednesday night.

And Trump didn’t exactly go dark before his late-night caller, or disappear from view after his morning chat. On Thursday night, he spoke to supporters at a “MAGA” rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. After his Fox & Friends interview, he addressed reporters in the Oval Office, noting, among other things, that he has no plans to fire his chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, despite his comments criticizing the decision to hike interest rates.

All of this occurred before his meeting with Kanye West, who told the president in a ten-minute Oval Office soliloquy that Trump “is on his hero’s journey right now” and that “he might not have thought he’d have a crazy mother-fucker like [me]” supporting him.

Earlier in the week, Trump gave an extended interview in the Oval Office to New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi, who described her surreal experience as a “private press conference,” during which the levers of the government seemed to pause as Trump, the vice president and his secretary of state, among others, gathered to convince her that there was nothing wrong with Trump’s relationship with his chief of staff.

Already lost in the shuffle was Trump’s surprise Q&A he staged with his departing U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley on Tuesday, where both took questions from the press to again, assure the public that there was nothing to see here except bonhomie.

Trump has never been one to cede the spotlight, but this week more than ever, the president appears to be virtually unavoidable for comment, spending most of his working hours either speaking in front of, or taking questions from, the press.

The ever-present president is part of a new media strategy, current and former White House officials said, driven by the president’s natural impulses, that the communications department has sought to institute for months. It is part of a move away from the set pieces of the daily briefing, which takes staff hours to prepare for and which Trump has never liked, the formal presidential press conference, and the stiff, sit down interviews on a straight news program like 60 Minutes — all tools that previous presidents have relied on to get their message out to supporters and detractors alike.

Instead, Trump is leaning into his preferred mode of communication: In staccato bursts of availability, he talks about the issues he wants to address, in his own words, for as long as he feels like talking, addressing, for the most part, the sole audience of his base.

It’s also strategy that appears more accessible than it really is: it allows Trump to dictate the terms of the interactions with the press, rather than vice versa.

Current and former aides attribute the strategy to Trump, himself, but also credit communications director Bill Shine with, as one former aide put it, “putting him in better situations and thinking through the production value.” They also credit the the successful confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the renegotiation of a new NAFTA trade deal for Trump’s upbeat mood.

Presidents in the past have been criticized for being overexposed at different moments in their terms. In the spring of 2009, for example, President Barack Obama was seemingly everywhere while trying to sell his economic agenda, hosting a town hall meeting on CNN, before popping up on late night television with Jay Leno, and then talking about out his college basketball picks on ESPN.

But even the former president’s critics said in the end, it worked for him, just as it seems to work for Trump. “President’s never get overexposed,” said Bryan Lanza, a former Trump campaign aide. “The more they’re out there, the more they’re engaging the specific electorate. It’s oxygen to their supporters.”

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders agreed. “The President is always the best messenger,” she said. “It’s a great thing when the American people get to hear directly from him.”

Other White House officials accused the press of wanting it both ways: complaining when there’s not enough access, and accusing the president of overexposure when there seems to be too much.

“You are right the press just wants to complain,” Sanders added in an email. “It’s either not enough or it’s too much. I think the bigger story is that the President is only one person and he has more energy and stamina than all the press combined! They can’t keep up!”

There are differences, however, in Obama’s media tour and Trump’s seeming omnipresence, that contrast how they view the tool of the communications office, and what audience they are trying to target. Trump does not appear to be tying his interviews and media appearances to any policy he is trying to sell — rather, the press and the spotlight appear to be the ends in and of themselves.

“Presidential communications are typically integrated with some discipline into the governing program,” said Robert Bauer, who served as White House counsel in the Obama administration. “Political capital is supposed to be dispensed with some care. The impression you have here is that he has an urgent need to be visible and control the public space. But as a governing matter, that is problematic because rather than the presidential communications serving government purposes, it’s the opposite.”

And while Obama’s media tours were driven by a desire to speak to the entire country by putting the president in front of different audiences, Trump’s is more about blotting out the sun with his base.

“Most of the stuff he’s doing is exposure to one audience and one audience alone and that is his base,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former communications director in the Obama White House, who noted that it doesn’t appear to be backfiring. “I haven’t seen anything to suggest they want to see less of him.”

While many of Trump’s media hits are driven by impulse and muscle memory — in his pre-political life he developed a symbiotic relationship with the New York tabloids —
former aides said it all makes sense right now if the White House is viewing the midterms as a base turnout election that is framed as an up or down vote on Trump, himself.

“In order to do that,” said one former White House official, “he needs to make sure people are thinking about him on Election Day. The best way to do that is more exposure to him in the markets that his base watches.”

President Donald Trump loves to brag about ratings, but he’s not getting them anymore.

As he’s ramped up his rally schedule ahead of the midterms, viewership numbers for the raucous primetime events have been roughly similar to — sometimes dipping below — Fox News’ regular programming, and the network has recently stopped airing most evening events in full.

During three Trump rallies last week, Fox News showed clips and highlights from his speeches but stuck largely with its normal weekday primetime programming. On Saturday, when “Fox Report Weekend” and “Justice with Judge Jeanine” would ordinarily air, the network showed Trump’s speech from Topeka, Kan., in full. But on Tuesday, a rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa, was particularly hard to find — it was not aired live on any major network, and even C-SPAN cut away for other news. And on Wednesday night, as Trump took the stage in Erie, Pa., at 7 p.m., Fox News stuck with its coverage of Hurricane Michael.

Since Trump took office, CNN and MSNBC have mostly declined to air his campaign rallies, though, like Fox News, they’ll typically carry any presidential speeches or comments to reporters.

Fox still provides livestreams of the campaign events online, but in a crucial period with the midterms less than a month away, some in the White House are worried that the president is losing a prime-time megaphone to his base.

One senior White House official was unsure why the network would decide to cut away from presidential rallies, saying officials planned “to look into that” and wouldn’t be surprised if White House communications director Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive, was in touch with former colleagues about the trend.

The loss of national coverage is equally, if not more, concerning to the candidates on whose behalf Trump is traveling the country.

“It exposes us to a national audience that we normally don’t get to,” a Senate Republican campaign staffer said of the coverage of Trump rallies. “We tend to see lots of new sign-ups and small-dollar donations. There’s obviously folks streaming [rallies] online, but being able to be onstage with the president in front of a primetime audience is huge for a campaign trying to reach conservatives across the country who will open up their wallets.”

A source close to Trump described the declining coverage as a “huge loss on the state and local level for Republicans because they’re certainly not going to get any of that on other cable networks.”

“If they stop taking them completely, that might create a problem,” this person said. “Trump is a massive consumer of the media, so he may be disappointed.”

Neither Fox News nor the White House responded to requests for comment.

But from Fox’s perspective, Trump is no longer a sure bet to beat Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham. For instance, on Aug. 30, Fox News’ 8 p.m. hour was mostly consumed by Trump’s rally in Evansville, Ind., earning 2.536 million viewers, according to Nielsen, compared with the 2.8 million viewers Carlson averaged at that time during 2018’s third quarter.

In 2017, when Trump rallied much less frequently, his events at times popped for more than 4 million viewers on Fox News — a number he hasn’t come close to in 2018, according to a POLITICO assessment of Nielsen ratings. This year, numbers have typically ranged from 2.5 to 3.5 million, per Nielsen, depending on a variety of factors, including day, time and whether there’s a big football game on another channel.

The biggest change is the sheer number of rallies. With so many, “they don’t want to give up so much primetime real estate,” said one person familiar with Fox News’ decision making.

Trump’s campaign speeches tend to follow a similar pattern, and this person said network officials’ fear was that too much repetition would lead to lower ratings. That could particularly be a problem during a busy news period like the first week of October, when Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination was still up in the air.

“They’re going with the route they think will give the best ratings performance,” the person said.

Compounding the issue, Fox News can’t take commercial breaks while Trump is speaking — he often goes on for more than an hour — costing the network some of its best advertising slots. With so many rallies and little promise of a ratings boost, there’s not much incentive for the network to clear air time.

It can also be frustrating to plan an hour-long show knowing each block might be swapped for a standard presidential stump speech, said former Fox News host Eric Bolling, who left the network in September 2017 but whose program was often interrupted by rally coverage during his tenure.

Not too long ago, the president’s preferred network was taking jabs at competitors for declining to air the entirety of his remarks. “Trump rally live & only on Fox News, other networks ignore presidential rally,” read a chyron during a June appearance by Trump in Duluth, Minn., as CNN and MSNBC stuck to their standard shows. At least four more times between June and July, Fox News traded its primetime lineup for live coverage of the president’s rallies when other cable news networks chose alternative programming.

But Trump has considerably increased his campaign travel in the final weeks before the midterm elections, leaving Fox News to decide between wall-to-wall coverage of his rallies or more selective airtime for the president. One GOP campaign operative said nightly rallies aired live and in full would probably subject Fox News to even greater scrutiny. The channel has often been described as a “propaganda machine” by Trump’s political opponents, many of whom claim its coverage of his administration has at times been sycophantic.

“If every night Trump does a rally a station carries it, you just become the president’s station,” the GOP operative said.

The president hasn’t faulted the network so far for recent changes to its programming. At his Tuesday-night rally in Iowa — which wasn’t aired — he heaped praise on his “great friends” at Fox News.

“We got a lot of good people. Do we like Tucker?” he asked the crowd. “I like Tucker.”

Two of U.S. President Donald Trump’s top Cabinet members, Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have expressed grave concern over the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist who went missing a week ago after entering the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul.

The president, however, has struck a different tone.

“I don’t like hearing about it, and hopefully that will sort itself out,” Trump said Monday, adding that he is “concerned” about the fate of Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who has recently been critical of the kingdom’s leadership.

According to reports in multiple outlets, Turkish intelligence believes Khashoggi was killed by the Saudi government. Yet, despite his access to sensitive intelligence information, Trump told reporters Tuesday he has no special insight into the situation.

“I know nothing. I know what everybody else knows,” he said. Trump said he has not yet been in contact with the Saudis, but “I will … at some point.”

The U.S. leader’s almost blasé tenor has concerned press advocates, who worry that Saudi Arabia and other countries that have cracked down on free expression will conclude that the U.S. is uninterested in the disappearance of a writer for one of its most famous newspapers — a form of apathy that could put other journalists working overseas at risk.

Summer Lopez, the senior director of free expression programs at PEN America, said previous U.S. presidents invariably spoke out forcefully when journalists or dissidents were attacked, but Trump is not following their example.

“That’s a dangerous situation to be in,” she said.

Khashoggi’s disappearance comes as press freedom advocates around the world have expressed concern that Trump’s rhetoric about “fake news” encourages foreign leaders to clamp down on media. And journalists in many parts of the world are operating in increasingly risky environments.

Last week, Bulgarian journalist Victoria Marinova was murdered, the third such killing of a European Union journalist in the past year. According to Reporters Without Borders, 57 journalists have been killed so far in 2018, two more than in all of 2017. And while Trump administration figures like Pence, Pompeo and departing U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley have criticized Myanmar for imprisoning two Reuters journalists as they were reporting on the killing of villagers by security forces, Trump himself has not addressed the issue as forcefully.

Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, called it “confusing” that Trump has shown less interest in protecting journalists abroad than have others in his administration.

“I hope it’s not confusing at all to the Saudi government,” Simon said. “I hope the Saudi government is in no way confused about what the implications of this are.”

Kristine Coratti Kelly, the Washington Post’s vice president for communication and events, said Tuesday that the paper has been in touch with the U.S., Saudi and Turkish governments about Khashoggi.

“As long as there is a chance Jamal is alive, we are pressing anyone who could help provide answers, push for accountability and, most important of all, if he’s alive, help save his life,” Kelly said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Though Trump’s statements certainly send signals across the globe, it is not clear what the government is doing behind the scenes. In a State Department briefing on Tuesday, spokesperson Heather Nauert said that while the U.S. government doesn’t know what happened to the columnist, “we have been engaged in this matter.”

Pompeo on Monday called for a “transparent” and “thorough” investigation. Pence declared in a tweet that “violence against journalists across the globe is a threat to freedom of the press & human rights. The free world deserves answers.”

Several members of Congress, including Republican Senators Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio and Bob Corker and Democratic Senators Chris Coons and Chris Murphy, weighed in even earlier to express concern over Khashoggi’s fate.

But Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute, said Saudi leaders — including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, with whom Trump has said he has a strong relationship — will be keyed in on the president’s comments, regardless of what anyone else in the administration says or does.

They “will take note only if and when President Trump himself decides to make a stand over the case,” he said. “If the worst that happens is a rap on the knuckles from the State Department, that’s probably something the Saudis can live with.”

Neil Quilliam, a senior research fellow for the Middle East and North Africa at the Chatham House think tank, said the Saudis were sure to notice when Trump said he knew “nothing” about Khashoggi’s case.

“For them, that’s a great signal,” he said. “He’s not particularly bothered by this. He’s not going to rake [them] over the coals for this; it’s not a major issue that deserves or requires his attention. He’s almost nonchalant.”

Margaux Ewen, executive director of Reporters Without Borders North America, said she is encouraged that Trump expressed concern but wishes his statements had been stronger. As shocking as Khashoggi’s case is, she said, her overriding concern is that Trump, with his frequent attacks on “the fake news media” in America, “sets the overall tone that the U.S. doesn’t really value press freedom.”

“We’re not leading by example, and so whenever we make condemnations of other countries’ anti-press behavior, it may seem like hollow words,” Ewen said.

Ulrichsen expressed a similar fear.

“My concern,” he said, “is that if the U.S. is not robust enough in making it clear that there are real costs for such actions, authoritarian governments might feel further emboldened to strike again.”

President Donald Trump has badmouthed his hometown newspaper’s reporting as “sick,” “weak,” and “nasty.” He even tells its reporters they work for the “failing New York Times.” But in moments of reflection, he’s allowed that it’s a “great, great American jewel.”

The Grey Lady has long occupied space in Trump’s head — and, in happier times, his heart.

“A paper I once loved,” Trump wistfully recalled at a news conference last week.

So, when the Times published its latest Trump exposé Tuesday evening detailing how the president’s mythology of becoming a self-made businessman appears to be the product of elaborate Trump family tax evasion schemes — and even outright fraud — it hit the White House like a thunderclap.

One administration official said the president viewed the report as not only part of the newspaper’s animus toward him, but the start of a broader media scheme to smoke out confidential information about his finances. On Fox News, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, said the paper might be provoking Trump into a lawsuit that could require access to his long-withheld tax returns.

Trump lashed out at the report himself in a Wednesday tweet: “The Failing New York Times did something I have never seen done before,” he wrote. “They used the concept of ‘time value of money’ in doing a very old, boring and often told hit piece on me.”

Presidential aides and allies say they expect he will continue blasting the paper in coming days, while arguing that he hasn’t been dishonest, only a savvy businessman. Or, as he said during a 2016 campaign debate of the charge that he had not paid federal income tax for years: “That makes me smart,” adding that his money “would be squandered” by the federal government.

“That will be the line,” one Trump adviser familiar with his thinking said after The Times piece hit. “You’re going to start hearing that at his rallies.”

Sam Nunberg, a former adviser to Trump’s campaign and business, added that he suspects the president “would be much more upset if this was a whole article about him not being worth a lot of money.” The article did not question Trump’s much-disputed net worth, instead suggesting that he had inherited far more from his father — more than $400 million — than the roughly $1 million loan he has long claimed.

The epic story dropped with particular force because of its location: Trump typically reads the print edition of the Times, including the Metro Section, flipping through several other papers each morning, a former aide said. (The tax expose took up eight inside pages in Wednesday’s print edition.) He also reads Times stories as they post online throughout the day, at least when they’re printed out and shown to him.

Aides have long understood the importance of the paper —which Trump has read, manipulated and fought with since before some of its best-known reporters were born — to the Manhattan real estate mogul.

He made his first prominent appearance in the Times’ pages in a glowing 1976 profile that began: “He is tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford.” The story, which ran under the headline, “Donald Trump, Real Estate Promoter, Builds Image as He Buys Buildings,” is often considered to be instrumental to the launch of his celebrity.

After he took office, White House officials said they soon learned the esteem in which Trump held the paper, through his tirades generated by its stories, his scores of tweets reacting to the reporting, and the unsanctioned interviews he granted to its reporters. One official said they view Trumpas having a keen appreciation for the way the paper drives the news cycle.

“He reads the ink off the New York Times,” a former White House official told POLITICO, noting the product of Queens has always considered the Grey Lady “the big leagues of American journalism.” Before Trump came to dominate the Times’ news and opinion pages, he kept count of the number of times he appeared on its front page. He was known to clip out and mark up its articles in felt pen, scrawling messages of approbation, or abhorrence, before sending them back to their Times authors.

Trump’s devotion also has made the paper a favorite for White House and campaign hands who want to get information to the public — or settle a score. “Everybody knows, if you want to get dirt, get it into the Times,” the former official said.

Administration officials still flag Times journalists to Trump when they are around him, particularly when he travels. He’s singled out its reporters for interviews, sometimes walking to the back of Air Force One to gaggle when he knows a Times reporter is aboard. Trump and aides were especially delighted by a June 1 Times headline that read, “We ran out of words to describe how good the jobs numbers are.”

In a written statement to the Times, Charles J. Harder, a lawyer for the president, said the reporting in the tax article was incorrect. “The New York Times’ allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory,” Harder said. “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate.”

After the piece went up online Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement saying the IRS decades ago reviewed and signed off on the transactions.

“The New York Times’ and other media outlets’ credibility with the American people is at an all-time low because they are consumed with attacking the president and his family 24/7 instead of reporting the news,” Sanders said. She added: “Perhaps another apology from the New York Times, like the one they had to issue after they got the 2016 election so embarrassingly wrong, is in order.”

But Sanders did not point to any specific inaccuracies in the Times report, and it is unclear what she would expect the Times to apologize for.

For Trump, the timing was especially fraught. Democrats have signaled plans to launch probes into his finances — including unreleased tax returns — if they win control of Congress next month. New York tax officials quickly said they were examining the report’s allegations of fraud. Some Trump allies have discussed whether the New York state attorney general’s office might get involved. The Times report said that the criminal statute of limitations has passed for the activities in question, but it is not too late for civil action against Trump or his family members.

The new story comes less than a month after another Times piece that particularly infuriated the president — an op-ed by an anonymous senior administration official suggesting that senior members of his own administration are working to thwart his agenda. “Does the so-called ‘Senior Administration Official’ really exist, or is it just the Failing New York Times with another phony source?” Trump tweeted afterward.

And when the Times ran an August story detailing how the White House counsel Don McGahn cooperated extensively in the special counsel investigation, Trump said on Twitter that unnamed members of the media were “very Angry at the Fake Story. They actually called to complain and apologize,” he said, without evidence. The Times issued a statement standing behind its report.

The Times regularly has been under the president’s skin. He’s dismissed it as a “joke” that trades in “total fiction,” calling for potential buyers who might “run it correctly, or let it fold with dignity.” (The Times is not for sale.) Trump on several occasions has called out White House reporter Maggie Haberman, attacking her on Twitter and at public events — including at his Tuesday rally in Mississippi.

He has even tussled with the paper’s new publisher: In January, he congratulated A.G. Sulzberger for assuming that job. After the two men met privately at the White House in July, Trump broke the meeting’s off-the-record agreement when he tweeted that they spent “much time” discussing “Fake News.” Sulzberger responded with a statement insisting that he had raised concerns about the president’s anti-press rhetoric.

Trump’s assessment of the paper as an “American jewel” and “a world jewel” came at a meeting with Times editors and reporters soon after the 2016 election. The president-elect complained that the paper had treated him unfairly during the campaign — but expressed a desire to improve the relationship as president. “I think it would make the job I am doing much easier,” Trump said.

“To me,” he added, “it would be a great achievement if I could come back here in a year or two and have a lot of folks here say, ‘You’ve done a great job.’”

Boris Johnson gets paid just under £23,000 a month for writing his weekly column in the Telegraph, according to the register of MPs’ interests.

The former U.K. foreign secretary’s entry in the register was updated this week and shows that he gets £22,916.66 a month for 10 hours’ work from the Telegraph Media Group. He has a long association with the paper, for which he has been EU correspondent and assistant editor.

When Johnson was a member of Theresa May’s Cabinet, he earned £141,505 a year (£11,792 a month) and, according to the Sunday Times last year, complained that it wasn’t enough to live on.

After quitting in protest at May’s Chequers Brexit plan, Johnson returned to the backbenches, where the basic salary is £77,379 a year plus expenses.

Austria’s interior ministry, headed by the right-wing Freedom Party (FPÖ), has accused several domestic media of “one-sided and negative” reporting, and advised the police which media to talk to and how to communicate with them.

A four-page email sent to the police includes a list of “critical media” — specifically naming Falter, Der Standard and Kurier — which, according to the ministry, “have unfortunately … operated a very one-sided and negative coverage of the interior ministry and the police.”

The mail, seen by some of the media under attack, including Der Standard, suggests “minimizing the communication with those media” as far as legally possible, and urges against “enabling exclusive coverage.”

The mail, sent under the name of interior ministry spokesman Christoph Pölzl, also lists media “that are willing to cooperate” and approves talking points such as migration.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne Benioff are buying Time magazine from Meredith Corp. for $190 million in cash, the latest example of a tech mogul acquiring a major news publication.

Meredith Corp., which purchased Time Inc. nine months ago, said in a statement the transaction is expected to close within 30 days.

“The Benioffs are purchasing TIME personally and the transaction is unrelated to Salesforce.com, where Mr. Benioff is Chairman, co-CEO and founder,” the statement said. “Mr. and Mrs. Benioff will not be involved in the day-to-day operations or journalistic decisions, which will continue to be led by TIME’s current executive leadership team.”

The Salesforce CEO will be in good company in tech industry circles. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos acquired the Washington Post for $250 million five years ago, and Laurene Powell Jobs, via her Emerson Collective, took a majority stake in the Atlantic last year.

Marc Benioff acknowledged the news, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, on Twitter.

“The power of Time has always been in its unique storytelling of the people & issues that affect us all & connect us all,” he tweeted. “A treasure trove of our history & culture. We have deep respect for their organization & honored to be stewards of this iconic brand.”

Posted late Wednesday afternoon on the website of the New York Times, the anonymous piece that everyone’s talking about reiterated all the wicked things anonymous White House sources had been telling the Times, the Washington Post, POLITICO, Axios, Bloomberg News, et al., about Donald Trump. The president is amoral, Anonymous wrote. He’s anti-democratic. He’s impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective. He flip-flops. He can’t stay on topic and is given to repetitive rants. He’s unstable, says the piece, whose headline and dek tell the story: “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration: I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

Anonymous, perhaps the deepest Deep Throat since Watergate, continues: He’s only one member of the Trump administration’s internal resistance — he and others monkey-wrenched the White House operation to “do what’s right when Donald Trump won’t.” That’s not news, either, as the press has charted the foot-draggers in the administration. Just Tuesday, we learned from Bob Woodward’s anonymously sourced new book, “Fear: Trump in the White House,” that aides have pilfered papers from the president’s desk to prevent him from signing them. But the Times’ anonymous op-ed writer makes the case that there’s an ongoing insurrection within the administration. If true, that means 1) Donald Trump, our elected president, isn’t in control of his own team and 2) that the show is being run by anonymous bureaucrats who, depending on how you look at it, are self-anointed patriots or traitors. (We know where the president stands: As I filed this, Trump tweeted simply: “TREASON?”)

The op-ed sent Washington ass-over-applecart because it breaks with the Washington tradition that holds that the accepted way for a government whistleblower to undermine an administration is to leak information to the press (Mark Felt, the original Deep Throat), pilfer documents (Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers), or make themselves visible and resign in protest (Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus in Watergate’s Saturday Night Massacre) and join the opposition. For somebody with the paranoiac tendencies of Donald Trump, the op-ed has got to look like something worse than the “deep state” he’s always harping about. It’s like a silent coup.

It goes without saying that the president and his muscle will tear the plasterboard off the West Wing to unmask and punish Anonymous and his confreres. But seeing as Anonymous’ identity is news, the press hounds will be baying, too. Ordinarily, reporters avoid exposing the anonymous sources of other reporters because they don’t want to set a precedent that will result in their sources getting outed.

Journalists suffered no compunctions about revealing the identities of both authors, and they will work as hard as Trump to uncover him.

The rare violation of this mutually assured destruction pact came after Watergate, when everybody and their brother tried to identify the original Deep Throat, Bob Woodward’s secret source in All the President’s Men. Once in the early 1980s, when Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen came close to correctly naming Mark Felt as the mysterious source, Woodward did everything he could do to wave him off. “It’s not him, I said, adopting the well-tested Watergate strategy that when all else fails, lie,” Woodward confesses in his 2005 book, “The Secret Man.” “Cohen didn’t do the column.”

The New York Timesdid the right thing in publishing Anonymous because the “first duty of the press “is to obtain the correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation.” But having posited the ongoing conspiracy against the president, he can’t expect the press — maybe not even reporters on the news side of the New York Times — to protect his identity. He’s not an anonymous source for a journalist; he’s an anonymous author publishing his work.

This puts him in a separate, more vulnerable category. He’s less like Deep Throat and more like journalist Joe Klein, the anonymous author of the best-selling novel “Primary Colors,” or Michael Scheuer, the CIA officer turned anonymous author of 2003’s “Through Our Enemies’ Eyes” and 2004’s “Imperial Hubris.” Journalists suffered no compunctions about revealing the identities of both authors, and they will work as hard as Trump to uncover him. Don’t feel bad for Anonymous: In Washington, such acts of subterfuge are automatically rewarded with big book contracts.

Trump’s response to the op-ed was predictably loopy, helping to make its case that the president wallows in a world of delusion. He rushed onto TV to recite the economic accomplishments of his administration and denounce the New York Times and other outlets as “phony.” Somewhere, the Resistance that Anonymous helps lead was busy sharpening its pencils and shredding documents they don’t want the president to sign. And the 25th Amendment was trending on Google.

Jack Shafer is POLITICO’s senior media writer.

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U.S. President Donald Trump reads from an article praising his administration as he answers a journalist during a meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C. on September 5 | Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump ripped Wednesday’s bombshell New York Times op-ed as “gutless” and demanded that the paper turn its author “over to government at once!” His press secretary called the unidentified senior administration official “a coward” and urged the person to resign.

Jim Dao, The Times’ op-ed editor, has a very different view. The official, he told POLITICO, clearly believes in a “sense of mission in being in government” and felt “quite strongly that they needed to speak out at an important moment in our history.”

The first-person opinion piece, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” hit like a thunderclap in Washington — as well as in the Times newsroom, where reporters were blindsided. The op-ed raised a host of ethical and journalistic questions many have never considered before, including whether Times news reporters — who work independent of the editorial department, which published the op-ed — should now set about determining the identity of an anonymous Times opinion writer.

One Times reporter said colleagues were already volleying back and forth with sources, trying to guess the writer’s identity. But for others, a sense of annoyance quickly set in, with some journalists frustrated about the position the Times’ editorial page had put the news section in.

Times reporter Jodi Kantor summed up the conundrum on Twitter, writing, “So basically: Times reporters now must try to unearth the identity of an author that our colleagues in Opinion have sworn to protect with anonymity?” She added: “Or is the entire newspaper bound by the promise of anonymity? I don’t think so, but this is fascinating. Not sure if there’s precedent.”

Ethical questions aside, there might also be strategic concerns for reporters. While the news and opinion sections operate separately, that point could be lost on potential sources, who could be spooked by Times news reporters working to reveal a Times editorial source.

“I don’t think any of us were expecting it,” said Helene Cooper, a veteran Times reporter who covers the Pentagon, adding, “I was shocked when I saw it.” Cooper said that while she was still processing the decision, she was not unhappy about it.

“My first reaction was, ‘Why are we doing this?’” she said. “But the more I think about it, is there any difference between that and when we give anonymity to sources?”

The Times’ opinion section has granted writers anonymity in the past. But that’s typically because the author, such as an undocumented immigrant or Syrian refugee, would be in clear danger if his or her identity were revealed. Dao said it was the first time in “anyone’s memory that we’ve done it with an American official.”

In the op-ed, the Times said it was withholding the author’s identity because the writer’s “job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.” That same justification is frequently used by Times reporters to grant sources anonymity, but Dao said that on the opinion side, editors don’t view an official speaking out in quite the same way that reporters view sources.

“We don’t call these people sources, we call them writers,” Dao said.

“Our mission is a bit different,” he added. “It’s to get people to write as honestly as they can about what they’re experiencing.”

In the piece, the senior administration official described high-ranking staffers as “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of [Trump’s] agenda and his worst inclinations” and having even discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to possibly remove the president from office.

While Trump’s erratic behavior and the concerns of exasperated staffers have been chronicled before, The Times’ framing and first-person perspective helped the piece ricochet quickly across social media. It also appeared amid this week’s frenzy over Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book, “Fear,” which, according to The Washington Post, depicts “Trump’s inner sanctum” as trying “to control his impulses and prevent disasters.”

The president already trashed Woodward’s book on Tuesday, claiming the legendary journalist “made up” quotes. (Woodward says he stands by his reporting). On Wednesday, Trump took aim at the “failing New York Times” for running what he called a “gutless editorial.” He later cryptically tweeted,“Treason?”

Dao said the the senior administration official reached out to him through an intermediary. He said that the op-ed page is a platform to “let people express themselves in their own words” and that “there was no effort to hide, mask or otherwise distort the person’s writing voice.”

Across Twitter, internet sleuths pounced, as users fixated on keywords and clues to try to run down the writer’s identity. A few Times accounts even provided unintentional, but inaccurate, clues.

Assistant Managing Editor Sam Dolnick tweeted about an op-ed from a “senior White House staffer”— as opposed to the op-ed itself, which referred much more broadly to a “senior administration official.” He later had to walk his tweet back, saying, “I have zero knowledge about the identity.”

Similarly, The Times’ official Twitter account referred to the writer as “he,” but Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said that the tweet, which remains up, was an error and that the person who posted it does not know the op-ed writer’s identity; only senior opinion editors do.

Cooper said she expected that Times reporters would try to determine the identity of the writer, like journalists at any other outlet.

“That’s our job, right?” she said. “The first thing I wanted to know was who wrote it, but I can guarantee you that the op-ed section is not going to tell us.”

No, the op-ed section isn’t going to tell reporters the writer’s identity — or how they should handle it.

“The Times newsroom is going to do what it’s going to do,” Dao said. “Just as they do not demand we run a certain op-ed, we don‘t tell them what to report on and not report on.”